M.O.N.K.E.

August 2023 - May 2024

The Mechanically Oriented Navigator of Kinetic Environments, or M.O.N.K.E. for short, is a robot with the sole purpose of traversing monkey bars, also known as brachiation. While many robots could complete this task, what makes M.O.N.K.E. special is that it completes the task while being underactuated—it only has one motor to control the motion of both of its arms.

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This project was undertaken by my team as our undergraduate capstone project at UCLA. With underactuated robotics being a major topic of ongoing research, we were lucky to have our capstone advisors be part of RoMeLa, UCLA's robotics and mechanisms laboratory.

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In terms of mechanical design, the main challenge was selecting the right motor for the job. With a budget of only $600, we simply could not afford the kind of motors that RoMeLa would have used for a project like this. After thorough research, we landed on a motor from a Chinese supplier that was supported with good documentation and responsive customer service. I developed the mechanical design with CAD modeling and selected the remaining electronic components based on the needs of the motor, while my teammates focused on creating a simulated version of the robot and developing a program to turn the outputs of the simulation into the proper series of motor commands.

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In the end, we were able to construct M.O.N.K.E. and have it successfully hook onto monkey bars one after another, however we did not have enough time to test out our stretch goal of being able to traverse bars with different spacings. This was my most rigorous challenge in component selection to date, and yet the build process went smoothly.